Porn and Relationships: Really?

Here's where I lose half my readership, or gain half with the "you're such a prude" and "get with reality" hate mail: I don't think porn has a place in marriage. I don't think it has a place in relationships. I think it demoralizes women and keeps true intimacy away.

I bring this subject up based on this post where a young reader admits that she and her boyfriend watch porn together. She has no problem with it.

Call me an old lady, but I'm concerned that she's not concerned with having sex with someone she isn't married to while watching other people have sex.

What's the big deal about porn? I'll tell you:

1. Real women can't live up to the false images on the screens. How will they not end up feeling ashamed of their own very real flaws? We all have them. If you don't yet, you will.

2. Human men can't possibly be expected to get true arousal (and intimacy) when true "perfection" resides in the box in front of them. Flat screens and big boobs are far more appealing than 3D women with flat boobs. And they won't want wives in surround sound chatting about their kids when they can have models moaning for more more more.

3. The regular media (as well as the porn industry) has set us all up to fail: Like McDonald French fries laden with addicting sugar, porn appeals to so many of our carnal instincts. (Nothing wrong with carnal instincts.) But instead of using these innate desires to build a relationship with another REAL LIFE person, we are using it as crack cocaine to make just ourselves feel good in the present.

With the power of a remote, we are made to feel we can control other people. We can stop and start things that pleasure us. We can turn it off when we're done.

We can't do the same with relationships. It's too hard. It's too messy. Porn can get hard and messy also, but it's a lot easier to clean up post solo-sex than a fight with a spouse or a lingering argument over who is supposed to take out the trash.

Marriages can be gruesome at times - no doubt about it. But if we don't run from the issues, and we aren't side tracked by false images that mean nothing in our daily lives, we can face our problems head on and heal.

If only all of us, like that famous "money shot", would put a magnifying glass on our own relationships. We would see in bright, technicolor magnificence everything that is and is not working.

In closing, I am not slamming my young reader for watching porn with her boyfriend. Why would she think it was damaging? Society makes it very clear on a daily basis that being sexy, doing sexy and acting sexy is what we need to be happy.

People, what we need to be happy is PEOPLE. Real people. Spouses who have faults and baggage but ultimately heart and soul. With heart and soul comes the power to heal, the power to forgive, and the power to love. Now try getting that from your boob tube. (Literally.)

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